EricEwe.com

Today Microsoft announced that they are officially going to cease operating the Bing Cashback program on July 30, 2010. The Bing Cashback program was setup as a loyalty program that offered consumers a percentage of their purchase at selected partner online store in terms of a cash back. The primary goal of that program was to support the Bing Search engine by cultivating loyalty through cash back and the partner online stores will have their Bing Cashback appear above the sponsored ads on Bing. At that time, Microsoft could have turned that application into an affiliate marketing network or become a super affiliate, but I have no idea why the executives did not have that foresight.

The birth of this program started with the acquisition of JellyFish in 2007, and that morphed into Bing Cashback when it launched in May 2008. When the program launched in 2008, they signed up 700 online stores or so from Sears, Overstock to eBay. Within the last two years, they signed on another 300+ online stores to have 1000+ online stores.

Bing Cashback was never thought out before implementation from strategy to execution. Although they announce the death of Bing Cashback, I would spin this around and turn the program and platform into something else which would see a positive cash flow in 6 months. They just need to think beyond using that to support the Bing Search.

I was in Seattle recently and I met up with some of my friends from college, most of them worked for Microsoft. Wait, I think it was everybody who worked for Microsoft and there were people from the server group, guys who were working on the long awaited Windows 7 to some guys working on the infrastructure of their internal applications. One thing I heard from them were “Microsoft and the new anti virus” and everybody was given a beta copy.

Recently, Microsoft entered into the highly lucritive anti virus industry. In 2006, the industry was estimated at $4 billion and growing at 13.6% from the year before and that industry continues to grow as computers become more affordable. The new software released on Sept 29, 2009 is called Microsoft Security Essential and the it is a free download. Yes, FREE. The Microsoft Security Essentials provides real-time protection for your home PC that guards against viruses, spyware, and other malicious software. 

Reviews so far looks positive as it is simple to use, quiet and efficient. It is compatible with WIndows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7 and you must have a genuine Windows to run the program. One cannot run Security Essential with other anti virus applications. The Security Essentials public beta also took fourth place in a recent roundup of free antivirus software. In a tests conducted by AV-Test.org, the Microsoft Security Essentials beta detected 97.8 percent of malware.

For a free application, I give it two thumbs up!

Link to download Microsoft Security Essential